True Manliness. Thomas Smart Hughes

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      The strain and burden of a great message of deliverance to men has again and again found the weak places in the faith and courage of the most devoted and heroic of those to whom it has been entrusted. Moses pleads under its pressure that another may be sent in his place, asking despairingly, “Why hast thou sent me?” Elijah prays for death. Mohammed passes years of despondency and hesitation under the sneers of those who scoff, “There goeth the son of Abdallah, who hath his converse with God!” Such shrinkings and doubtings enlist our sympathy, make us feel the tie of a common humanity which binds us to such men. But no one, I suppose, will maintain that perfect manliness would not suppress, at any rate, the open expression of any such feelings. The man who has to lead a great revolution should keep all misgivings to himself, and the weight of them so kept must often prove the sorest part of his burden.

XXIII.

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      We have most of us, at one time or another of our lives, passed through trying ordeals, the memory of which we can by no means dwell on with pleasure. Times they were of blinding and driving storm, and howling winds, out of which voices as of evil spirits spoke close in our ears—tauntingly, temptingly, whispering to the mischievous wild beast which lurks in the bottom of all our hearts—now, “Rouse up! art thou a man and darest not do this thing;” now, “Rise, kill and eat—it is thine, wilt thou not take it? Shall the flimsy scruples of this teacher, or the sanctified cant of that, bar thy way and balk thee of thine own? Thou hast strength to have them—to brave all things in earth or heaven, or hell; put out thy strength, and be a man!”

      Then did not the wild beast within us shake itself, and feel its power, sweeping away all the “Thou shalt nots,” which the Law wrote up before us in letters of fire, with the “I will” of hardy, godless, self-assertion? And all the while, which alone made the storm really dreadful to us, was there not the still small voice, never to be altogether silenced by the roarings of the tempest of passion, by the evil voices, by our own violent attempts to stifle it;—the still small voice appealing to the man, the true man, within us, which is made in the image of God, calling on him to assert his dominion over the wild beast—to obey, and conquer, and live. Aye! and though we may have followed other voices, have we not, while following them, confessed in our hearts that all true strength, and nobleness, and manliness was to be found in the other path. Do I say that most of us have had to tread this path and fight this battle? Surely I might have said all of us; all, at least, who have passed the bright days of their boyhood. The clear and keen intellect no less than the dull and heavy; the weak, the cold, the nervous, no less than the strong and passionate of body. The arms and the field have been divers—can have been the same, I suppose, to no two men, but the battle must have been the same to all. One here and there may have had a foretaste of it as a boy; but it is the young man’s battle, and not the boy’s, thank God for it! That most hateful and fearful of all relatives, call it by what name we will—self, the natural man, the old Adam—must have risen up before each of us in early manhood, if not sooner, challenging the true man within us, to which the Spirit of God is speaking, to a struggle for life or death.

      Gird yourself, then, for the fight, my young brother, and take up the pledge which was made for you when you were a helpless child. This world, and all others, time and eternity, for you hang upon the issue. This enemy must be met and vanquished—not finally, for no man while on earth, I suppose, can say that he is slain; but, when once known and recognized, met and vanquished he must be, by God’s help, in this and that encounter, before you can be truly called a man; before you can really enjoy any one even of this world’s good things.

XXIV.

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      In the course of my inquiries on the subject of muscular Christians, their works and ways, a fact has forced itself on my attention, which, for the sake of ingenious youth, ought not to be passed over. I find then, that, side by side with these muscular Christians, and apparently claiming some sort of connection with them (the same concern, as the pirates of trade-marks say) have risen up another set of persons, against whom I desire to caution my readers. I must call the persons in question “musclemen,” as distinguished from muscular Christians; the only point in common between the two being that both hold it to be a good thing to have strong and well-exercised bodies, ready to be put at the shortest notice to any work of which bodies are capable, and to do it well. Here all likeness ends; for the “muscleman” seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given him, except some hazy idea that it is to go up and down the world with him, belaboring men and captivating women for his benefit or pleasure, at once the servant and fomenter of those fierce and brutal passions which he seems to think it a necessity, and rather a fine thing than otherwise, to indulge and obey. Whereas, so far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he. For mere power, whether of body or intellect, he has (I hope and believe) no reverence whatever, though, cæteris paribus, he would probably himself, as a matter of taste prefer the man who can lift a hundred-weight round his head with his little finger to the man who can construct a string of perfect Sorites.

XXV.

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      As a rule, the more thoroughly disciplined and fit a man may be for any really great work, the more conscious will he be of his own unfitness for it, the more distrustful of himself, the more anxious not to thrust himself forward. It is only the zeal of the half-instructed when the hour of a great deliverance has come at last—of those who have had a glimpse of the glory of the goal, but have never known or counted the perils of the path which leads to it—which is ready with the prompt response, “Yes—we can drink of the cup, we can be baptized with the baptism.”

XXVI.

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      How can we be ever on the watch for the evil which is so near us? We cannot; but one is with us, is in us, who can and will, if we will let him.

      Men found this out in the old time, and have felt it and known it ever since. Three thousand years ago this truth dawned upon the old Psalmist, and struck him with awe. He struggled with it; he tried to escape from it, but in vain. “Whither shall I go,” he says “from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”

      Is any of us stronger or wiser than the Psalmist? Is there any place for us to flee to, which was not open to him? My brethren, had we not better make up our minds to accept and acknowledge the truth, to which our own consciences bear witness, that not only in heaven, and in hell, and in the uttermost parts of sea and earth, He is present, but that in the inmost recesses of our own hearts there is no escape from his Spirit—that He is there also, sustaining us, pleading with us, punishing us.

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